Tomorrow marks the solemn 30th anniversary of one of the most brutal events in Mobile’s long history.

On March 21, 1981, two members of the United Klans of America kidnapped and murdered 19-year-old Michael Donald and hung his body from a tree on Herndon Avenue. Coming 26 years after Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi, and 16 years after the bloody confrontations in Selma, Donald’s murder focused attention on Mobile’s racial climate as never before.

It would be more than two years before an FBI investigation revealed the identity of Donald’s murderers and the motivation behind their crime.

In May 1983, officials brought charges against two members of the local chapter of the United Klans of America: Henry Francis Hays, son of the local Klan leader, and James Knowles, who was only 17 years old.

They kidnapped and murdered Donald in retaliation for the acquittal of a black man accused of killing a white police officer in Birmingham. That case had been relocated to the Port City because of pre-trial publicity.

Even three decades later, the randomness of the crime only adds to its barbarity. The two Klansmen chose Donald for no reason other than the color of his skin.

Hays was executed for Donald’s murder. Knowles served a lengthy prison sentence and is under federal witness protection.

In 1987, the Southern Poverty Law Center won a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, Michael’s mother. The landmark $7 million judgment bankrupted the United Klans of America — the same organization whose members were responsible for the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and a host of other violent acts during the 1960s and 1970s. Similar suits have been won using the legal precedent set by the Donald case.

Today, Herndon Avenue has been renamed to honor Michael Donald’s memory. In 2009, a historic marker was placed in front of the tree where Hays and Knowles hung his lifeless body.

The tree is one of three locations on the African-American Heritage Trail that speak to a more complex retelling of Mobile’s racial past.

Three blocks east of Michael Donald Avenue sits Unity Point Park, the civil rights monument honoring the efforts of John LeFlore and Joseph Langan. There may be no greater illustration of Mobile’s complex racial history than the proximity of these two monuments: the one the community has chosen to highlight, and the one many would just as soon forget.

To be certain, the Donald lynching makes for difficult history. It illuminates a dark period in Mobile’s past, a time when City Hall was rife with corruption and allegations of police brutality against blacks were frequent.

Donald’s murder came in the midst of the Bolden v. City of Mobile trials, a decade-long legal battle to make the city government more inclusive.

It would be easy to think of Donald’s murder as an aberration to an otherwise spotless narrative. But Mobile has a long and violent racial history which is often overlooked.

The local Klan burned crosses on the lawns of black businessmen and white reformers like Joseph Langan and Dorothy Danner. In 1953, two avowed Klansmen ran for the city commission, using the caricature of a lynching victim on their campaign material.

In 1967, John LeFlore’s home was bombed. During the late 1960s, homes and businesses were burned and demonstrators were beaten.

It’s easy to forget such things, to focus on the positive and label those who bring up Donald’s death — like novelist Ravi Howard, filmmaker Margaret Brown or journalist Ted Koppel — as sensationalists. But it’s difficult to dismiss so quickly one of the last lynchings in American history.

Michael Donald’s death is fixed like a fishbone in Mobile’s throat, belying notions of respectability and the delusional discourse on a "post-racial America."

Much has changed in the last 30 years but, in many respects, Mobile remains a deeply divided city.

If there are any real lessons to be taken from the Michael Donald lynching, I think they come from the courageous actions of the men who pursued his murderers and, more important, Donald’s family.

In 1987, Beulah Mae Donald sat quietly in a federal courtroom listening to horrific details of the night her youngest son was killed. Near the end of the trial, she offered heartfelt forgiveness to one of her son’s murderers.

More than 20 years later, one of Beulah Mae’s daughters, Cecelia, walked down Herndon Avenue with a petition in hand in an effort to rename the street in memory of her brother.

The Donald family embodies the closing lines from Langston Hughes’ poem, "Alabama Earth."

Serve — and hate will die unborn.

Love — and chains are broken.

They honor the memory of Michael Donald with their actions far more than any historic marker could ever hope to do.

Scotty E. Kirkland, a local historian, wrote his master’s thesis on the civil rights movement in Mobile. His e-mail address is sekirkland@yahoo.com.